Chapter 18
LUCA
“You’ve got everything?”
We’re sitting in my driveway, Noel and I, staring at the front door of my house as my truck’s engine idles. His hands are gripping his bag’s strap so tightly that his knuckles blanch.
Cutting his eyes sideways, he nods once. “Yeah. It’s all in here.”
There’s a beat, and he still doesn’t move to undo his seatbelt or get out.
He’s watching that door like he’s waiting for something, like it’s the mouth of some monster, liable to open up and swallow him whole.
It’s clear just how badly he doesn’t want to do this, be alone in a room with Demi.
I can read it in every line of his tense body, the stiffness in his narrow jaw and the wide, fixed gaze.
Much as I’d love to save him from this—from any inconvenience, really, if it were possible—him and Demi will have to learn to get along if any of this is going to work.
They’re going to have to at least tolerate being in the same room together like adults, preferably without me chaperoning every time.
Of course, Noel’s not the problem here. He’s not the one who misbehaved.
“Do you want me to walk you in?” I offer.
He shakes his head vehemently and finally shrugs off the seatbelt. “No. Of course not. I’m not five.”
I hesitate. “Maybe I should stay after all. I’m sure Dad can settle for a phone call or something.”
His eyes brighten, then immediately go flat. “No,” he says, with an almost obligated responsibility rather than actually feeling that way. “You should go. There’s probably an important reason he wants to meet up in person.”
“Alright, then go on. You’re gonna make me late.”
He huffs and immediately contradicts himself. “I wasn’t aware you were running on a strict timetable, meeting your dad in a moldy graveyard.”
“It’s where my mom is buried.”
His face goes stricken. “Oh, shit. Sorry. I’m just making stupid jokes because—you know. Nerves.”
“Brat,” I say affectionately. “It’s fine.”
It is a strange place to ask to meet, the cemetery.
Ominous and probably on purpose. I actually couldn’t remember the last time we’d gone and visited her gravesite together.
It wasn’t as far back as the funeral, but maybe close.
The fact he was asking now when he was so seemingly sick was not lost on me.
He was trying to send a message of some kind and no, that wasn’t paranoia speaking on my part.
If there’s anything I can say, it’s that I know my father.
“Luca?” Noel’s voice, sweet and questioning. His hand hovers over the door’s handle.
I lean across the center console to give him a kiss.
We both linger, his hands sliding up my shoulders, and I know he wants to make it something more, some excuse to stay in here a little longer.
I wrap my fingers around his and give him a smile when I pull back.
“Demi promised to behave. You’re gonna be fine. ”
“So are you,” he returns. “Gonna be fine, I mean.”
He exits the truck at last, and I watch him walk up the driveway and towards the house. It’s only then that I finally force myself away and back out and drive the thirty minutes to the cemetery over in Watertown, where my mother was buried when I was fourteen.
I actually don’t feel any sort of way coming here anymore.
In the early days it was fraught, horrible thing, and my dad had to drag me here.
Usually every Sunday after church we’d come, lay more flowers to decay and wither away at the demure marble plaque that I always thought wasn’t nearly grand enough for her.
Then the constant visits tapered off; or maybe it was that he stopped asking me. I’m not sure.
But I come here on my own, now. Not often, just sometimes. On the anniversary of her death, always, and a couple times in between that. Sometimes I’ll leave flowers, but most of the time I just come and sit and think.
I spot my uncle’s shiny new SUV in the cemetery’s parking lot and park alongside it.
My father’s nowhere to be seen, but my uncle sits in the driver’s seat, looking steadily ahead even as I jump out and slam the door.
It’s only when I round the front of his car that he deigns it necessary to acknowledge my presence by joining me.
“Hello, nephew,” Uncle Drew says mildly.
He’s older than my father by a couple years, but you wouldn’t know it.
He wears those sixty-odd years much better.
Though his hair has gone the same steely gray, his face is smoother, clear of the deep, dark grooves that furrow his brother’s.
Some of that I know can be attributed to Botox, but even his skin looks younger, fresher.
He’s got that healthy, natural kind of glow that just can’t be replicated by expensive treatments.
He has not run half his life on anger and hate.
In fact, this is the most serious I’ve ever seen him.
We give each other a perfunctory hug, no warmth in it at all.
It’s a sort of chilling dichotomy to how jovial he was back at Easter, wine-drunk and slapping my back so hard I thought he would crack my ribs.
I know where his allegiance lies now, and it’s not with me.
His repeated texts and calls have made this abundantly clear.
“I wanted to talk to you, Luca,” he says. His English is not as accented as my dad’s. “Before you go catch up with your father.”
“Sure,” I say warily.
He gives me a brisk nod and puts his hands in the pockets of his chinos, turning and looking towards the cemetery gate. “He’s not doing so well,” he says at length. “Nick.”
“I know that.” Even if I hadn’t been witnessing it personally, I would’ve known from all the accusatory texts and voicemails alone.
“I mean, he has gotten worse in the last few weeks.” He levels his gaze at me. Green. Seems like every one of us in the Karvelas clan has green eyes. “I took him to the doctor yesterday. He—well, he’ll want to tell you himself.”
There are dark, anvil-shaped clouds building on the horizon, and between them I can see tongues of lightning, but for now we’re in the summer sun with only the swift, rain-scented breeze to warm us of an impending storm. I rub my arms.
“But you should know that your actions affect him very directly,” my uncle goes on, unclipping his sunglasses from his shirt. They look expensive. “I would suggest curbing your behavior in light of that.”
“What behavior is that, Uncle Drew?” I ask this innocently.
The dark frames settle across his nose. “You know what.”
“I don’t.”
“The homosexuality, Luca,” he snaps, and I almost laugh because it sounds so fucking ridiculous.
But no. He really means it. And that’s a sobering enough thought.
“Was it not enough the first time? That incident broke your father’s heart.
He has never been the same since then. Now you’ve gone and done it again. ”
“Broke his heart?” I say incredulously. “He broke my ex-boyfriend’s face.”
My uncle snaps his mouth shut and glares at me. He doesn’t particularly appreciate the reminder of my dad’s abject violence and is not quite willing to absolve him of it, either, which, points for him, I guess. “It was a long time ago. Ten years. You can’t hold that against him, still.”
“Must be easy for you to say. You weren’t there when it happened. It wasn’t someone you loved getting torn to pieces.”
He doesn’t argue against that. It doesn’t stop him from insisting that I should simply cease being gay, however.
“If you could at least pretend until the baby’s born,” he says, virtually pleading with me.
“It would mean so much to Nick. He wants to be present for his granddaughter. He can’t do that when he can hardly—”
“No.” It’s easy enough to say. “I’ve been pretending since I married Demi. I’m not doing it anymore. It’s my life, too. I don’t have to live it for anyone but me.”
“You’re being selfish.” He spits the last word.
I wonder if this is how Noel felt, when I tried to make him do the same—to pretend, to hide, to wait for me, until I was ready.
It’s a cold sort of rage that’s seeping through me, so cold it burns, as I marvel at our definitions of what’s selfish and fair and how very different they are.
Oh, Noel was justified to lash out at me the way he did, for his anger and the things he said about me that were true.
I knew it before but I really know it now.
I’d done to him exactly what my father, and now my uncle, have done to me.
Neither of us say anything more. My uncle is finished trying to convince me one way or the other, I suppose, because he throws up his hands in disgust and retreats back to his car. After the door slams I’m on my own.
I turn and enter the cemetery, following the familiar, winding paths between the graves.
When I was younger, I used to reach out and run my fingertips along the tops of the taller markers as I passed—an urge and habit both cut short by my father’s insistence that it was disrespectful.
I suppose that’s one thing he was right about.
It’s not long before Dad’s forlorn figure comes into view, waiting at my mother’s marker with flowers grasped in one gnarled hand.
He looks worse than before. I can hear his wheezing, wet breath even before I come up beside him, and he seems sort of withered beneath his clothes.
Yet he’s got more of a belly than he did even weeks ago, and he’s leaning on a cane now, which is a new development.
I think I know exactly what I’m looking at, what it is that he’s dying of, even before he tells me. Have sort of known it the whole time, ever since he mentioned the heart problems.
“Congestive heart failure,” he says without looking at me. He stoops to lay the flowers at my mother’s grave, but I gently take them from him and do it myself. I know it will be an effort for him to rise again. “Doctor says a good year left, depending.”